


At Rest

by autoschediastic



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Blood and Injury, Caretaking, Friendship/Love, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:15:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22296922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autoschediastic/pseuds/autoschediastic
Summary: Three moments in time Geralt and Jaskier rest.Intimacy with a witcher, Jaskier learned fairly early on, is definitely of a strange sort. Bodies are a surprising free-for-all, weapons are tolerated only as absolutely required, and emotions are ignored so thoroughly as to be non-existent.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 41
Kudos: 957
Collections: Best Geralt





	At Rest

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to [katherine_tag](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katherine_tag/pseuds/katherine_tag) for the beta and hand-holding as I dive back into fandom after a five-year hibernation.

“You really are beautiful,” Jaskier says with soft sincerity, chin in hand, lute slowly quieting. Beyond the fire’s light the night is not unpleasantly cool; they haven’t descended that far into the sands just yet. Its merry crackling does more to warm his bones than the actual heat of it. 

Geralt’s brow furrows. He twists to look at Roach settled down near a scraggly excuse for a tree. 

“No, no, no. Well, yes, the horse—“

“Roach.”

“— _Roach_ is lovely, but I was talking to you.”

“When aren’t you,” Geralt mutters into the roasted leg of wild fowl he’s gnawing on. 

It’s been a little over a fortnight they’ve travelled together since the elven encounter in the Blue Mountains. Certainly not joined at the hip as Geralt fancies in his complaints—the absolute filth of Geralt’s vagabond existence has kept Jaskier in town once or thrice while the witcher goes about his slaughter—but together nonetheless. There’s been plenty of opportunity for Jaskier to study his companion. As an excellent judge of character and student of life, he’s confident in his assessment. 

“Your skin, when it’s not covered in various fluids and humours, that is, has an otherworldly glow to it,” Jaskier begins. “Cooled by moonlight, warmed by flames.”

“Did you hit your head?”

“Yes. Yes I did. It’s all your fault that my ears have been ringing since yesterday, thank you very much, but,” Jaskier waves the blame magnanimously aside, “that’s neither here nor there nor anywhere.” He smiles, delighted; that’s an excellent phrase to use in reference to their heroic wanderings. 

Geralt makes a wordless noise, the one that means he’s doubtful and not about to be convinced otherwise as opposed to the one that indicates a little prodding will get him to admit to a remote possibility. 

“As I was saying—”

“Which is all you ever do.”

“—you, my friend, have all the wild savage beauty of a winter’s storm. Oh, that’s good. That’s very good. And yet, and yet…” Jaskier puts a hand to his mouth, fingertip tap-tapping as he considers. “No, a wolf in a winter’s storm, wait, no. The other’s better. It’s better, right?” He doesn’t bother to pause for an answer he wouldn’t get. “But a wolf’s so accurate a comparison! Is it the mutations that do that? The hair, the eyes, the growling, the sharp teeth, don’t think I’ve missed those.”

“Yes.”

Jaskier stops on an inhale, startled. “Was that— Was that a straight and honest answer?”

Geralt’s eyebrow lifts minutely. 

“That’s, that’s,” a miracle, divine intervention, destiny itself rising to the fore. 

“Monstrous?” Geralt supplies. 

“Enchanting!” 

Geralt bites the gristle off the end of a bone and spits it into the fire. 

“That,” Jaskier says, pointing, “less so, but still proves my point. A wolf is a wild creature without care for the niceties of men. No use for false manners and delicate lies.” He stands, thrilled, and plucks a few strings. The fire snaps and pops in counterpoint. “With a wolf, what you see is what you get. And I don’t mean that in a simplistic way, oh no. A wolf is honest. When he’s hungry, he eats. When he’s tired, he sleeps. He doesn’t kill what doesn’t need killing! He protects himself and his own; wishes for nothing more than a peaceful place to rest, a full belly—”

“Sounds like he’s full of shit.”

Jaskier’s mouth snaps shut, teeth clacking. He takes a careful breath through his nose, then another. The air smells of ash and meat and witcher; a strange combination of leather and oil, herbs and iron. “Learn to take a fucking compliment, Geralt, I swear.”

“Was one in there?”

“Of course there was, you great gorgeous oaf!”

“...hm.”

Jaskier paces in a tight circle, sputtering. He’s a _poet_ , for sweet mercy’s sake. A wordsmith, a teller of timeless truths; never mind some of what he sings are exaggerations, that’s merely artistic license to help commoners and aristocrats alike come to grips with concepts so much larger than the simple lives they know. 

Geralt watches as he marches about, then calmly reaches for the meat left abandoned on the cleanest stone Jaskier could find to use as a plate. 

“There!” Jaskier exclaims, whirling on his heel. “There, you see! Look at that! The play of light and shadow, the subtle flex of magnificent muscle, the shameless satisfaction of one’s most basic need!” Jaskier sinks into a sorrowful crouch. “It’s beautiful,” he wails mournfully into his hands. 

“There are easier ways to ask for a fuck,” Geralt points out as he chews. “Faster, too.”

Jaskier shouts, “I don’t want to fuck you!” as he surges upright. “I want to compose odes to the stupid perfect curve of your— Wait, what?”

“Perhaps in the morning,” Geralt says, tossing yet another bone aside and wiping his hands on his shirt. “I’m full now.”

Jaskier’s eyes narrow. “You’re fucking with me.”

“I said I’m—”

“Full now, yes, yes.” Jaskier starts to pace again, stops after a step and a half, turns to stare accusingly at Geralt’s bland expression, then finally heaves a mighty breath and sits. “You’re a terrible person and I hate you.”

Geralt’s quiet grunt this time is one of wholehearted agreement. 

“You know I didn’t mean that.”

A less agreeable grunt. 

Jaskier sighs again. “Can you at least accept that I think you’re beautiful?”

“Of course,” Geralt rumbles, the tiniest quirk at the corner of his mouth. “You’re insane.”

“I am _not_.”

Geralt makes his doubtful, not-to-be-convinced-otherwise noise with an added touch of incredulity. 

“Granted that there’s a certain amount of foolishness in following a witcher from one end of the Continent to the other, many have done far, far worse for the sake of their art.” 

The fire banked for the night, Geralt stretches out atop his bedroll, one arm tucked beneath his head and the other within perfect reach of the myriad weapons he carts about. 

“Fine,” Jaskier huffs. “Good night, sleep well, fuck you in the morning.”

Geralt’s response is one Jaskier isn’t yet familiar with; it’s softer at the edges, suggests a sort of resigned amusement, and very likely contains a mild threat of violence should he be awoken before he’s good and ready. He’s little more than a shadow in the embers’ glow, as still and silent as the scrub brush that surrounds their small camp. 

Witchers at rest are commonly called such things as unnatural, corpse-like; pale moon-bright nightmares as terrible as the things they hunt. Not so very long ago, Jaskier was perfectly content with these delightfully lyrical depictions. 

The heaviness in his chest now is a far cry from contentment. 

*

“Oho,” Jaskier calls as he steps outside the inn’s commons, “our witcher has returned triumphantly, oh…yes….

Oh, _no_.”

Geralt tumbles from Roach’s back like a sack of rotten potatoes. He’s on his knees in the mud, chest heaving like a bellows, before Jaskier reaches his side. His boots are sodden, his breeches torn and dripping, everything from the waist down soaked so heavily with blood it looks as if he waded through a lake of it. 

“Help me!” Jaskier sets himself as solidly as he can on the slippery ground and gives a mighty heave. Geralt sways slightly to the left. “Does he look like a fucking feather pillow!? _Help me!_ ”

A few men with hearts thankfully softer than their heads crowd close. Amongst a cloud of awed cursing they manage to get Geralt to his feet and into the room Jaskier kept warm with a generous blaze since the cold winds rolled down the mountains yesterday. 

“By the fire,” Jaskier barks. His heart is in his throat, choking him, but he doles out orders in quick succession: whatever clean blankets or cloths or towels the innkeep can spare, several buckets filled with water both hot and cold, the saddlebags still with Roach, and finally space to work. The matron from the mayor’s, a sturdy woman who still regards witchers and mages and their ilk with a wary eye, accomplishes the last. Jaskier breathes his thanks as she ushers the final lingering gawker along; she pauses, nods, and closes the door with a meaningful thump. 

“My bag,” Geralt rasps, reaching. 

“Yes, I’ve got it,” Jaskier says, gently slapping his hand away. “Stay still.”

His face drawn and sweat-soaked, breath wheezing shallowly over bloodless lips, Geralt still manages to look unimpressed. Jaskier generously ignores it as he cuts through the remains of Geralt’s breeches, tugging gently to free them from the wound’s crusted edges. At the first clear look of what he’s dealing with, Jaskier’s stomach roils. It’s not a large wound compared to most he’s seen Geralt both inflict and endure, but it’s deep and vicious, ripping from the crook of his thigh into his groin. 

“That’s not,” Jaskier stammers, swallowing hard, “that’s not supposed to be on the outside.”

“No.” Geralt hisses through his teeth as he goes to push the small, glistening protrusion back where it belongs.

“Geralt!” Jaskier slaps his hands away again, then plunges his own into a bucket of water he’d intended on cooling at least a little first. “You’re filthy. It’ll fester.”

“In my bag—”

“I _know_ ,” Jaskier snaps. “The purplish-blue one. It’s by your stupid, _stupid_ head.” Both hands clean and smarting from the steaming water, Jaskier sets about carefully righting the terrible wrong done to Geralt’s body. He throws up only a little—and thankfully into a bucket already completely fouled with blood and worse—as he works. At some point between sterilizing a needle threaded with silk and a very good attempt at thinking of it as a puzzle as he fits the wound’s ragged edges together, a flask of potent spirits appears at his elbow. Geralt stares at it wordlessly. Jaskier sighs. The very last thing he wants to do is start the puzzle all over again. 

A quietly rumbled, “Please,” changes his mind completely. 

“Well if you’re going to interrupt me anyway,” he says conversationally and licks sweat from his lips before helping himself to a generous mouthful. He keeps his hand as steadily in place on the wound as possible while Geralt awkwardly drinks. “Good now? Might I continue?”

Geralt says nothing at all, not even one of his surprisingly eloquent grunts. As the needle slides into pale flesh, Jaskier thinks about all the things it would’ve been nice to hear. 

“You’re very lucky I’m such a competent companion,” Jaskier explains. He’s thankful Geralt’s potions are so highly effective; this would be much more difficult if he had to deal with fresh gouts of blood on Geralt’s every breath. “Your scars are very interesting and all that nonsense, but there’s a limit to every canvas, you know. Thanks to me this won’t tip yours into gaudiness.”

Jaskier’s stitches are small, neat, and blessedly quick. Still it seems an age until he ties off the last one. Sweat has run rivulets through the blood he hadn’t bothered to clean away, mixing with dirt and spilled water to form sickly puddles beneath Geralt. His hands finally begin to shake when he drags the last clean bucket close. 

“Come on,” he replies to Geralt’s heavy gaze without meeting it, wringing a cloth again and again to gently sponge away the filth. “I’m not going to leave you here in this mess. It’s my room too, you know. How am I going to get a good night’s sleep with all this around?”

What Geralt needs is a warm bath, but as confident as Jaskier is in his stitching he’d still rather Geralt stay put until the various bits and bobs that make him a witcher kick in to knit the wound more securely shut. 

Even as sweaty as Geralt is, the rest of his clothes stubbornly refuse to do anything but peel stickily away. Jaskier winces several times through the process as more than a few pale hairs come away with ruined cloth. When Geralt loses several near the soft slump of his cock, Jaskier flinches and mutters an entirely insufficient apology. 

_You’re just getting revenge for the last time you fell off Roach_ , is what he deeply suspects Geralt’s low hum translates as. 

“I did not _fall off_ ,” Jaskier insists. Conversations with Geralt have a familiar rhythm and tend to progress along the same general lines—Geralt claims Jaskier did a thing that he absolutely didn’t do and vehemently denies it; or Jaskier claims Geralt did a thing that he most likely did do and doesn’t bother with denial—and he sees no good reason for that to be any different when he happens to be cleaning blood off Geralt’s balls. 

Intimacy with a witcher, Jaskier learned fairly early on, is definitely of a strange sort. Bodies are a surprising free-for-all, weapons are tolerated only as absolutely required, and emotions are ignored so thoroughly as to be non-existent. 

“That’s where the ‘no feelings’ bullshit comes from, isn’t it?” Geralt’s eyes have closed; it wouldn’t be much of a shock at all if he started snoring—if Geralt were one to snore, anyway, but the bastard’s as quiet in sleep as he is in waking. Jaskier’s only concession is to lower his voice a touch; it’s not as if he’d ever even consider shutting up while he has a captive audience. “It's not that you don’t have them. Oh no, I’ve seen plenty that proves you’ve got them. It’s that you’re such a stingy fuck with them! They’re not exactly a finite resource, you know. I don’t care if you’re a hundred and bloody thirty, you don’t need to ration out a single smile every other decade.” 

Jaskier pauses. “It’s not coming up on an anniversary, is it? I know I said I wanted to be in court by season’s end but if there’s a chance you’ll grace the world with showing your teeth in something other than a snarl within the next, oh, year or two, I’ll make an exception. Imagine the song that would make!” He hums a few experimental bars and sings, “Eyes black as a cursed eclipse; rarer still the curve of his lips…”

“Jaskier.”

Jaskier startles; he’d forgotten that Geralt was simply ignoring him as usual, not sleeping off the latest contract. He’d also somehow missed that the cloth was growing cold where he held it against the inside of Geralt’s thigh. “Cold, yes, right. Back to the task, ah, at hand. I’ll get another bottle if you’re done with that one.”

“Don’t bother,” says Geralt as he smoothly sits up, entirely as if he hadn’t been falling on his ass like a drunken courtier less than an hour ago. He tugs off his shirt where it barely clings to one arm, then gives it a short, considering glance before tossing it aside. “I’d rather beer.”

“Oh, well, yes, of course,” Jaskier says grandly, and pulls his hand back from between the careless sprawl of Geralt’s legs. “I’m here to serve your every fleeting whim.”

“Food then, too.” Geralt bends to appraise Jaskier’s work, deems it good enough with another of his nonverbal speeches, and takes the cloth from Jaskier to dab negligently at the smattering of slashes on his far side. “I’m hungry.”

“Believe it or not, I figured that out when you oh so politely asked for something to eat.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“ _I know_.”

Geralt inhales deeply, the way he does when scenting the wind, his entire upper body rising and falling slower than a sleeping man’s heartbeat. “It smells good.” Another slow, almost languorous breath. “There’s beef.”

For Geralt, this display is tantamount to climbing stark naked onto a table and declaring he’ll satisfy whole generations of women for the meagerest of portions. And he is, Jaskier’s well aware, more than capable of doing it. 

Jaskier huffs, “Fine,” and clambers to his feet. Every single one of his twenty years makes itself known in his aching knees. “Just.” He scrubs both hands over his face. “Stay there, alright?”

Geralt tosses the bloodstained cloth into the nearest bucket and draws up a knee to rest his arm on.

“Right,” Jaskier mutters. 

The noise of the common room hits Jaskier like a wave. It’s rowdy enough he should have heard it from the room, but all he remembers is the crackling fire and Geralt’s slowing breaths. He makes his way to the squat counter amidst back slaps and cheers, as if _he_ were the one to rid them of their little pest problem, not the man sitting alone and naked in a pool of filth and blood. He grins and waves and hams it up to the hilt, belting out a few impromptu lyrics praising Geralt’s mighty, steel-banded thews, and flees with an overburdened tray. 

His grin becomes far more genuine when he finds Geralt exactly where he left him, picking knots out of his dirtied hair. “They love you,” he declares. 

Geralt’s gaze flicks at the tray. “Hm,” he allows and crams a hunk of gravy-soaked bread into his mouth the moment it’s in range. 

While Geralt first devours and then slows to merely gulping down his meal, Jaskier tidies up. 

“I’m not your chambermaid,” Jaskier reminds him, waving vaguely to encompass tending his wounds, delivering his meal, and scrubbing his back. “I’m doing this out of _kindness_. For my _friend_.” He pauses in packing away the bottles and herbs that tumbled earlier from Geralt’s bag. “Do you need the salve?”

Geralt’s eyebrows slowly, oh so very slowly, lift. 

“Shut up.”

Since Geralt obeys so readily, Jaskier sinks once more to the floor and starts to work the knots of half a day’s ride holding in his own guts from Geralt’s shoulders.

*

“Overpriced piss-water,” Jaskier declares, thumping a fresh pitcher and two frothless mugs onto the crooked wooden table. 

“It is,” Geralt agrees, and drains his in one impressive go. He wipes his mouth with the back of a hand. All but one of the candles in their deserted little corner sit extinguished, trailing weak grey smoke to the rafters. His hood is pulled low. “But beggars and choosers, bard.”

Jaskier snorts. “There would be a lot more begging around here if you hadn’t come along. Ungrateful louts.” He takes a generous swig, grimaces at the taste but considers the warming of his belly worth it, and gestures vaguely at his face. “Are you still…?”

Geralt tilts his head a fraction towards the light; his eyes glint like a tomcat’s. 

“I don’t see what’s so terrible about it.” Jaskier refills Geralt’s mug and tops up his own on principle. He makes a game attempt at settling in for awhile, but he’s honestly sat upon more comfortable rocks. “A professional hazard, that’s all it is. There are Ebbing survivors with such gruesome disfigurements that your stomach _churns_ —“ 

Jaskier’s voice goes up an octave; 

“—with a damned hell of a lot more than pity, but none would _dare_ —“ 

an octave more; 

“—the discourtesy of failing to look them square in the eye.” Beer sloshes over the rim of Jaskier’s mug as it strikes the table; his voice hits a peak. “No one _likes_ to look at such things, but you respect the truth of them!” 

“Calm down,” Geralt says, smiling a very, very little, “or you’ll frighten off our next round.”

Jaskier glances at their evening’s host huddled on the far side of a very long bar. Given their lack of drinking company, the fellow’s most definitely cutting into his profits simply by allowing them to stay.

“Bollocks to him,” Jaskier mutters into his drink, letting go of his rising passions with no little difficulty. He gives the barkeep a jaunty salute and a smile as false as the first dawn, then pointedly turns his back. A fine bouquet of sour sweat, shit, and just a touch of cat’s piss wafts through the room as a door opens somewhere beyond the kitchens. They drink in silent gloom for a few minutes until Jaskier, peering intently at Geralt’s shadowed face, decides, “I’ve had nastier pimples.”

“No doubt,” Geralt agrees. The smell doesn’t seem to bother him at all, even combined with the remnants of a successful hunt drying on his clothes. 

“Half-dead drunks have worse spidering across their stinking faces.”

“Jaskier.”

But he’s got his rhythm back now. “Jaundiced eyeballs with more sickly-red run through than a butcher’s sewer.”

“Jaskier.”

“What!”

“Leave off. I’m used to it.”

“Leave off? _Leave off_?”

“I said—”

“I don’t care how used to this horseshit you are! It’s unfair, unjust, and fuck every last one of them, it’s _untrue_!” That’s it, the floodgates have splintered; there’s nothing for anyone to do now but ride the torrent. “Tossing back an elixir or two so you don’t bleed to death while saving their ungrateful asses does _not_ make your eyes the portals to the pits of _hell!_ ” No longer sitting but half standing on his stool, Jaskier thrusts a shaking finger straight into Geralt’s face. “Those black witcher eyes are the most beautiful eyes in all the spheres! I worship them as the saviour of all peoples good and kind!”

A choked noise comes from across the room. Jaskier whirls about, finger still pointed. “And you! A hot meal, a hotter bath, and the finest eiderdowns to be found in this wretched town! My lord is weary and he will have the glorious rest that is his due!”

Jaskier abruptly falls silent, chest heaving. His gaze darts about, from the barkeep to the table he’s now standing fully upon, lastly to Geralt’s raised brows and soft smile. 

“If you please,” Jaskier finishes, and sits his ass down where he stands. He drags a hand through his hair, huffs. Plops his chin in his hand, elbow on his knee. “A little bit carried away, maybe.” 

Geralt clears a path to the pitcher with a nudge to Jaskier’s legs. “Only a little.”

“I honestly don’t know what's wrong with them,” Jaskier sighs, but he’s run out of steam now. Such prejudice isn’t easy to suffer even when it’s adjacent. “To not see what I do when they look at you.”

“I’ve learned that it matters very little what others choose to see.” Mug in hand, Geralt turns a fraction sideways and tips his hood back. His hair’s snarled and dirtied but as always the strands are soft in Jaskier’s hands. Thick like an expensive fur and just as warm. “Unless you want it to.”

Jaskier is quiet a moment more, gently carding his fingers through Geralt’s hair. It knots as terribly as a pelt, too, when Geralt goes too long without oils. “I hope the kitchen isn’t as slow with your bath as they are with our supper,” he says, pushing a smoothed portion aside. “You stink like graveir shit.”

“Impossible.”

“Oh?”

“Graveirs don’t shit.”

Jaskier laughs. “Fair enough, witcher.” He scratches a chunk of dried something-or-other from Geralt’s scalp with blunt nails. “Fair enough.”

Their supper, when it arrives, is blessedly several steps up from watery beer. A mixture of beans, root vegetables, and pork belly in a thick gravy, it’s the perfect meal to help a witcher regain his strength. Even Jaskier cleans his plate, though Geralt looks disappointed to not get at least a few leftover bites. 

“Sir Witcher,” squeaks a scabby youth; he’s clean enough but seems to have a bad habit of picking. “Tub’s full up in the back, sir, right full.”

“I’m not a sir,” Geralt says, not unkindly, as he rises. 

“Yessir,” the youth eagerly agrees. “Uh. I mean—“

“Three pennies if you fetch the leather pouch from upstairs. The one next to the basin,” Jaskier interrupts, “with the favour tied about the catch.”

Grinning at the prospect of pocketing pay that doesn’t come through the inn first—and thusly not reduced by an unfortunate percentage—the boy hurries off.

The back turns out to be a fairly sizable room laid with a mismatched stone floor. There are hooks for their clothes, benches for boots, even a heap of clean, worn bedding pressed into service as towels. Three wooden tubs, also mismatched, sit more or less in the centre of the room; one is steaming pleasantly. 

“This is a surprise,” Jaskier remarks, hurriedly stripping to the skin. “Do you think the soap’ll be any good? That stuff in Ban Gleann rid me of more skin than dirt.” As he’s rubbing his hands together in anticipation, the boy rushes in with his satchel. 

“This is a busy route in early autumn,” explains Geralt, “which makes now the best time for me to travel it.”

“Fewer travellers, more monsters,” Jaskier guesses, “so a clearer road for them later and a decent living for you now.” He clambers over the side of the tub, too impatient to wait for Geralt to finish fussing with all the sharp pointy things. The rest of his thoughts melt away like snow in the spring sun. “Oh. _Oh_.”

Water laps at Jaskier’s chin as Geralt finally settles in; his approving grunt is more groan, a wordless testament to the utter bliss Jaskier is in complete agreement with.

Jaskier begins, “Do you—“

“Yes.”

“You have no idea what I was about to ask you.”

A specific combination of crooked eyebrow and truncated hum counter, _Don’t I?_

“You can’t possibly! I hadn’t even decided which—“

“Yes, Jaskier,” Geralt says perfectly evenly, “I realize there’s not much left, but the damiana oil sounds… nice.”

Jaskier scoffs, “No way would I offer that up so freely,” even as he twists to dig out the bottle. “I nearly lost a toe getting this. A big one!”

“Her brother had more to do with that than the oil.”

Jaskier smiles in fond remembrance. “It would’ve been worth it either way.”

“I’m honoured.”

“You’re not.” Jaskier rinses the glass, gives it one last little shake; the subtle fragrance rises up even lazier than the oil’s slow seep across the water’s surface. “But you should be.”

Geralt simply settles in a little deeper. 

Though the candles are the same smoky tallow and the walls the same chinked wood, the city noise seems lessened here. It’s nowhere near the silence of the road, which isn’t actually very silent at all given the number of things that creep, crawl, and shuffle just beyond its edges. And while Geralt is generally a quiet companion—not taciturn, more an aggressive sort of calm—and moves as silently as a cat’s ghost when he so chooses, at this moment he’s surrounded by a dozen small sounds: a breath, a splash, a brush of skin on skin, a contented hum as sore muscles loosen. Jaskier isn’t exactly sure what to call this hushed clamour.

But if he had to put a name to it, he’d call it comfort.

*

End

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on Twitter [@bluesoaring](https://twitter.com/bluesoaring) and tumblr [bluesoaring](https://bluesoaring.tumblr.com/).


End file.
